Rock, Paper, Shotgun

I was a bit poorly last week, and couldn’t quite manage to hold it together long enough to compile a bargain bucket. Normal service has resumed now though, so read on for this weekends top discounted PC downloads. You can always rely on SavyGamer.co.uk to bring you updates for the latest gaming price drops. (more…)

@PeterMolydeux operates a twitter feed of brilliant ideas, inspired by the thoughts and imaginings of an unspecified developer, which has been a source of intrigue and belly laughs since its inception. Just looking at today’s feed I see these startling visions: “Just imagine a kart game where you spend most of the game building one with your mother in a shed, you are the only people alive on earth” and “you play a baby in a pram and can only see your parent’s faces. Studying those faces deeply is the key to true progress”. This being the year of the Game Jam, a global 48 hour extravaganza will take place this weekend, exploring the visionary’s finest brain-eggs. Livestreams, chat and more await here.

In the weekend family get-together of the fantasy RPGs, Uncle Diablo is hanging around, talking to his niece Torchlight about her new tattoos. She’s just asked where Path Of Exile is. “He’s suffering from stress and couldn’t make it”, said Uncy D. Abstractly, of course: what’s actually happening is that Path of Exile, Grinding Gears’ isometric online action-RPG is actually holding a stress test this weekend, from Friday to Sunday, and everyone’s invited. Now the closed beta members might be a bit sniffy at the sudden influx of unlevelled scum, but if you just follow these simple rules we’ll all get along famously: left mouse for hitting; right mouse for also hitting. Got it? (more…)

Rayman: Origins Oranges, the latter-day reboot of the Rayman platform series, made its way to PC yesterday, which was happy news for anyone who picked up on the surprising critical buzz around last year’s console versions. I’ve been bounding through the singleplayer, though have yet to try the co-op multiplayer mode. Here = words.>

I’ve pinballed from outright glee to making a pathetic whimpering noise like a dog locked inside a cupboard while playing the resolutely 2D reboot of venerable platformer Rayman, but the glee always returns. It is, especially in its initial zones, a purely joyful experience, showering its player with visual and interactive gifts like a weirdo French Santa. While the visual tomfoolery never ceases – angry mutant oranges, giant forks with the demeanour of a scolding fishwife – it’s nonetheless a precision jumping game that isn’t afraid to inflict suffering. (more…)

I should probably disclose that I’ve known the developer of Gunpoint, PC Gamer’s Tom Francis, for a few years now, having worked with him on that magazine in the dark times before RPS. And that means playing Gunpoint has a peculiar flavour to it, for me. I’m aware of the kinds of games that have had a significant influence on Francis – such as the platformer N, Deus Ex, Hitman, Splinter Cell, and so on – and I can see these sorts of influences displayed right on the surface of Gunpoint. We are each of us our interests, of course, and I am sure this kind of thing is true of all indie developers, but seeing how someone’s brain remixes and recompiles the stuff they love has never been quite so clear to me as when playing the post-IGF build of this intricate platformer.

The Flare Path knows what it takes to plod across plateaus of pristine whiteness for day after day. Perhaps that’s why he has a picture of Robert Falcon Scott marmaladed to his fridge door, and a stuffed Avro Shackleton dangling from his bedroom ceiling. It could also explain why he’s decided to visit both the Arctic and the Antarctic in the deep-frozen hunk of seal blubber that is this week’s column.

Browser-based narrative experiment Echo Bazaar has quite the following and when it took on the new name, Fallen London, I decided I was long overdue a visit to the delirious, devil-haunted sprawl of suggestive steampunk. It’s a browser-based adventure, working from a lovingly illustrated but mostly textual interface, which involves seeking mysteries, stories, secrets and opportunities in the sunken city. There are stats that increase as plotlines are pursued and there are action points that replenish over time, or through the expenditure of real world currency. The pleasure of it isn’t really in the self-improvement though, it’s in the joy of discovery, and the word-forging and world-building are quite brilliant.

Here’s a big, bouncy ball of unexpected good news for you. Brian Fargo and his studio inXile Entertainment are, as you well know, working on a sequel to the seminal RPG Wasteland, and have successfully Kickstarted it to the tune of $1.6 million. Since exceeding their initial target of $900,000, they’ve been able to add Mac and Linux versions to their masterplan for the post-nuclear roleplaying game. But that’s not all. They’ve just been in touch to say that, if they can reach $2.1 million during the 17 days remaining on the funding schedule, they’ll be bringing in Obsidian Entertainment, including Planescape: Torment mastermind Chris Avellone, to help them make the game.

Oh my word. The minds behind Wasteland, Fallout and Planescape, together (or more accurately together again, in many cases). A veritable RPG supergroup. This has> to happen. (more…)

If the Planetside 2 GDC presentation was a novel, then the video that Sony Online have just released is the abridged audiobook. If you didn’t have the time to watch the 30 minutes of off-screen recordings we snuck up, then SOE have a decimated 3 minute trailer for your enjoyment, showing off the bits of the world, the vehicles and the combat that appeared at GDC. (more…)

Eight hundred?> Well, sort of. They’re not all working on it all of the time, but as Warren Spector explained to Eurogamer: “You can either build a studio that has 700 people, which I desperately don’t want to do, and didn’t and don’t and won’t, okay? Or you can find partners around the world… So we have people working in Leamington in the UK, in Bulgaria, China, Canada, California, Utah. We have an enormous virtual team.” That’s a bit like how RPS works, too, except we have five people. And some cats. They’re useless.

The Epic Mickey sequel – dubbed “The Power Of Two” because of its co-op shenanigans – will be out on PC in September, and we’ll be scanning the horizon for other details as they emerge. Trailer below. (more…)